roachboy

ok, so i dont get this thread at all:

first, i think that cowboy george needs to be held accountable for the massive fuck-up that was the federal response to katrina. period.
i do not see how, in any rational world, holding bush accountable for a fuckup of that magnitude can be reduced to the question of whether, in a particular press conference, or in any series of press conferences, he lied or not--fact is that this debacle followed from structural incoherence.
i think that questions about potential misuse of funds that were previously allocated for levee work should be investigated.
i think that state and local officials should also feel their feet being held to the fire over this.

this should not be a partisan affair
if you think about it, katrina posted problems for the entire governmental apparatus and the tacit arguments for legitimacy that rest on functioning infrastructure and/or service delivery, particularly service delivery in a natural disaster context.

so i see little more than damage control in all of this debate, including the reduction of what is at issue to the question of whether bush personally lied--which diverts things into the truly insignificant space of what goes on in the mind of the Leader, whether he knows he is lying or not, blah blah blah.

functionally, this is no different from how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

smooth's post earlier is interesting, and so as one would expect, it goes unremarked.
let us assume, then, that this entire nondebate operates within a framework of damage control.
that is, the whole of it is diversion.
to talk about what this fiasco points toward, you would have to talk about the nature, extent and brutality of class relations in the united states.
but no-one wants to do that--not the extreme right, not their partners in reaction in the democratic party--no-one wants to talk about that because it points to structural problems with the form of capitalism that the americans have inflicted upon themselves.
and for the far right, that discussion is impossible because capitalism is for them an unqualified good.
for the democrats, who differ from republicans only on questions of tactics, the same basic assumption obtains.

so what is the function of this debate, if coherent addressing of problems is excluded from the outset?

maybe smooth is right--that, in a perverse way, this is functional from the viewpoint of far-right politics in that it undermines the service-delivery functions of the state while leaving its police functions undebated--this from an ideological perspective.
of course, the right generally gets to make its arguments about the irrationality of the state in a vacuum (a polite way to refer to limbaugh and the horrifying rabnge of sub-limbaughs)--which is functional in that it enables the petit bourgeois listening public to pretend that nothing really is at stake in this matter, that one need only adopt an abstract position on the service-delivery functions of the state based on (truly idiotic) assumptions about bureaucracy and the public.
the fact of the matter is that the redistrubution of wealth--direct and indrect--is central to the political legitimacy of all capitalist states. neoliberal economic ideology is predicated upon this at the level of assumptions, even as it argues against such service delivery functions in the interest of increasing the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

so katrina revealed real problems---deep problems---structural problems--- system problems.
better to worry about whether george w bush lied or not.
the alternative is beginning to face the reality of the american economic order.
and if you think within the tiny orbits layed uot for you by the existing political formations in the states, you do not want that.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite